Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Maja Matarić
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA
mataric@usc.edu
ABSTRACT necessary hardware and software to provide a ready, “out of the
This paper presents progress on Quori, a low-cost socially interac- box” experience. Our hope is that Quori will provide a hardware
tive robot platform comprised of an upper-body humanoid with platform that will enable computing researchers to enter the field of
a rear projection head and two gesturing arms on a mobile base. HRI and develop and test algorithms, as well as conduct statistically
The robot’s hardware is introduced and features are explained. The significant user studies by deploying systems in the real world and
modularity, expandability, customizability, and affordability of the collecting user data to inform further computing research in HRI.
design are discussed. The information provided in this paper is By working with the HRI community to identify the most im-
meant to generate feedback for the final design of the robot, which portant hardware capabilities for a socially interactive robot, some
will be used to produce and award copies of the robot to select optimization can be achieved to lower cost and maximize function-
research groups for both in-lab and “in the wild” deployments. ality. The input of the HRI community on Quori’s design process
was collected via on-line surveys, hosted workshops, and confer-
KEYWORDS ence presentations. The data collected from our quorum (a diverse
group of researchers in the broader HRI community) directed our
socially interactive robots, non-contact HRI, low-cost hardware
design decisions for Quori’s hardware and software. This paper
ACM Reference Format: introduces the hardware and possible functions and uses of Quori.
Andrew Specian, Nick Eckenstein, Mark Yim, Ross Mead, Braden McDor- The analysis and discussion of survey data and the design process,
man, Simon Kim, and Maja Matarić. 2018. Preliminary system and hardware
as well as the integration of the hardware and low-level software,
design for Quori, a low-cost, modular, socially interactive robot. In HRI ’18
are beyond the scope of this paper.
Workshop: 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Inter-
action Workshop on “Social Robots in the Wild”, March 5–8, 2018, Chicago, IL, The goal of this paper is to capitalize on a unique interaction
USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 6 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/nnnnnnn. with the HRI community to receive our final round of feedback on
nnnnnnn the hardware direction and robot capabilities. This work is part
of a National Science Foundation Computing Research Infrastruc-
1 INTRODUCTION ture grant that will be awarding Quori robots to eight university
researchers with releavnt HRI research plans.
Hardware platforms for socially interactive robotics can be limiting
because of its cost or lack of functionality. This paper presents the
hardware for “Quori”, a novel, affordable, socially interactive robot
platform for enabling non-contact human-robot interaction (HRI) 2 SYSTEM OVERVIEW
research in both in-lab and “in the wild” experimental settings. In
its final form, the platform will be a complete package with all Quori consists of an expressive upper body attached to a omnidirec-
tional mobile base (Figure 1). Each part of the system is described
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or in detail in Section 3. We included design considerations for sen-
classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed sors needed for HRI (Figure 1, right), including sensing the robot’s
for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation
on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. internal state via motor encoders, as well as a laser range finder,
For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). camera, and microphones to sense the environment and user(s). An
HRI ’18 Workshop on “Social Robots in the Wild”, March 5, 2018, Chicago, IL, USA
example networking diagram for controlling the robot is shown in
© 2018 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
ACM ISBN 978-x-xxxx-xxxx-x/YY/MM. Figure 2.
https://doi.org/10.1145/nnnnnnn.nnnnnnn
HRI ’18 Workshop on “Social Robots in the Wild”, March 5, 2018, Chicago, IL, USA A. Specian et al.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work is supported by the National Science Foundation under
Grant No. CNS-1513275 and CNS-1513108.
REFERENCES
[1] John Tighe Costa and Mark Yim. 2017. Designing for uniform mobility using holo-
nomicity. In Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2017 IEEE International Conference
on. IEEE, 2448–2453.
[2] Frédéric Delaunay and Tony Belpaeme. 2012. Refined human-robot interac-
tion through retro-projected robotic heads. In 2012 IEEE Workshop on Advanced
Robotics and its Social Impacts (ARSO).
[3] Frédéric Delaunay, Joachim De Greeff, and Tony Belpaeme. 2009. Towards
retro-projected robot faces: an alternative to mechatronic and android faces. In
Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2009. RO-MAN 2009. The 18th IEEE
International Symposium on. IEEE, 306–311.
[4] Travis Deyle. 2010. VolksBot Omni: A Holonomic Robot Base Using only Robo-
tis Dynamixel Servos. (Aug 2010). http://www.hizook.com/blog/2010/08/01/
volksbot-omni-holonomic-robot-base-using-only-robotis-dynamixel-servos
[5] Ahmed El-Shenawy, Andrea Wellenreuther, Andre S Baumgart, and Essam
Badreddin. 2007. Comparing different holonomic mobile robots. In Systems,
Man and Cybernetics, 2007. ISIC. IEEE International Conference on. IEEE, 1584–
1589.
[6] Ross Alan Mead. 2015. Situated Proxemics and Multimodal Communication: Space,
Speech, and Gesture in Human-Robot Interaction. Ph.D. Dissertation. University
of Southern California.
[7] Masahiro Mori. 1970. The uncanny valley. Energy 7, 4 (1970), 33–35.
[8] Samer Al Moubayed, Gabriel Skantze, and Jonas Beskow. 2013. The FurHat
Back-Projected Humanoid Head–Lip Reading, Gaze and Multi-Party Interaction.
International Journal of Humanoid Robotics 10, 01 (2013), 1350005.
[9] Matthew Piccoli and Mark Yim. 2016. Anticogging: Torque ripple suppression,
modeling, and parameter selection. The International Journal of Robotics Research
35, 1-3 (2016), 148–160.
[10] Brennand Pierce, Takaaki Kuratate, Christian Vogl, and Gordon Cheng. 2012.
âĂIJMask-Bot 2iâĂİ: An active customisable robotic head with interchangeable
face. In Humanoid Robots (Humanoids), 2012 12th IEEE-RAS International Confer-
ence on. IEEE, 520–525.
[11] Cesar Vandevelde and Jelle Saldien. 2016. Demonstration of OPSORO-an open
platform for social robots. In Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 2016 11th ACM/IEEE
International Conference on. IEEE, 555–556.
[12] John P Whitney and Jessica K Hodgins. 2014. A passively safe and gravity-
counterbalanced anthropomorphic robot arm. In Robotics and Automation (ICRA),
2014 IEEE International Conference on. IEEE, 6168–6173.
[13] Michael Zinn, Oussama Khatib, Bernard Roth, and J Kenneth Salisbury. 2004.
Playing it safe [human-friendly robots]. Robotics & Automation Magazine, IEEE
11, 2 (2004), 12–21.
Figure 9: Top: plot showing the location required to have a
A ADDITIONAL FIGURES maximum FOV as measured by: the largest continuous visi-
bility (yellow), total visibility near the base (orange), and to-
tal visibility near the limit of the sensor (blue). Bottom: FOV
of our current design with the sensor offset 100mm. Blind
spots shaded in gray and the outer circle marking an 8-meter
radius about the robot marked as the smaller inner circle.
Figure 10: Power and electronic component diagram for Quori showing power (purple), actuation (red), computation (green),
sensing (yellow).